


Tra La La, Dr. King

by Sheryl_Holmes



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: BAMF Sarah Williams (Labyrinth), Dark Labyrinth, Doctor/Patient, F/M, Horror, Jareth (Labyrinth) Being An Asshole, Killer Faeries, Killer Fairies, Mind Games, Patient Sarah, Psychological Thriller, Psychological Trauma, Shrink Jareth, Slow Burn, Slow Burn so slow it's like the watch pot that never boils, Takes place in the Aboveground, Yearning, car crash, psychiatry, slowburn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-05-01 13:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14521356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheryl_Holmes/pseuds/Sheryl_Holmes
Summary: Sarah has been through an ordeal and, as a result, imagines she's endured the events of the Labyrinth. Her stepmother takes her to see a plethora of shrinks, none of whom help. When, at 17, Sarah experiences something impossible, in a last ditch effort, she is taken to the office of one Dr. J. King, an unorthodox psychiatrist dealing with traumatized teenagers.





	1. Growing up, Shrinking in

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is set in the 1970s, not the 80s. It is already posted on one other site but it’s ongoing, so updates will occur simultaneously. Enjoy!

_i_

It started with the crash.

Sarah remembered the moment in slow-motion—shattered glass like droplets of rain hovering in midair; Toby's toy dinosaurs suspended above his head, just out of his grasp; the airbag against her father's face looking soft and comforting, when in reality it was crushing his bones; the feel of the seatbelt against her chest like a vice grip, thieving her of breath; and hearing her stepmother's scream in the front seat the way one might hear the sound underwater—indistinct, gurgling. Then again, that might have been due to the blood in her mouth.

Then, without warning, it all sped up. The slingshot effect slammed her spine against the seat. What seemed to be only moments later, she found herself in a bright white hallway, unfamiliar faces hovering above her head but paying her unfocused mumblings no attention as they shouted to one another. She couldn't hear what they were saying.

She didn't remember passing out, but when she returned to awareness, her whole body ached terribly. Sarah pried her eyes open and saw someone in her peripheral vision. She turned her head, her neck protesting painfully. Though her eyesight was blurry, she could tell it was her stepmother. The woman at first looked very happy to see Sarah awake—maybe even surprised. And then, her face rapidly distorted into one of indescribable pain. She shook, nearly convulsed with the power of the oncoming sobs. As if she were physically breaking before Sarah's eyes, she hunched over, her hands coming up to hold her face. Her mouth was open in the ugliest of expressions, wet and misshapen. Sarah could tell she was trying to speak but Sarah herself was in too much pain, too out of it to help her stepmother get the words out. Finally, speaking through what could only be described as a wail, she spoke:

"Sarah!" she choked. Her eyes screwed shut. "Sarah, he's—he's _dead."_ Her hand flew out for Sarah's and landed on her forearm, clutching it just under the I.V. Sarah blinked, feeling her circulation getting cut off. She didn't understand what her stepmother was trying to say. _Who_ was dead?

"Darling," her stepmother's eyes opened when Sarah made no response. She took in a wobbly, wet, heaving breath. "Darling, I'm so sor—" She couldn't finish the apology; she couldn't get it out. Her hand slid off of Sarah's forearm and her unusually messy blonde hair hid her face as she wept next to Sarah's body on the hospital bed, clutching violently to the sterile white sheets.

Sarah's body seemed to understand these words before her mind did; she felt hot tears sear her dry skin on their way down the sides of her face.

_ii_

It had been three years since the car crash, three years since her father's funeral, and six months to the date since Karen had given up on forcing Sarah to get mental help.

Three years since the dreams had started.

It had begun the night after they returned from the hospital. Her sleep was fitful at first, for the first three weeks after the crash. Then, she started having night terrors featuring the characters from a child's story she'd been obsessed with before her father's death. The dreams were fanciful enough; Karen made her tell her what was causing her such emotional anguish. In fact, Karen had expected they'd be dreams of the crash. A part of her felt like Sarah should've grown up by now—that after such a horrible ordeal, after losing one's father, her worst nightmares should somehow be less about fairies and goblin kings and more about shattered glass and funerals. When she caught herself thinking this, however, Karen quickly banished that resentment; Sarah and Toby were all she had left of her husband and Sarah was the only one of the two who would be old enough to remember him in the years to come. She vowed to protect Sarah's innocence as long as she could, even if that innocence came in the form of silly nightmares.

At least, that's what she'd told herself. Karen quickly learned that these "silly nightmares" weren't as ridiculous or passing as she'd first anticipated. They were recurring and horrific. Often, Sarah couldn't remember what they were about by the time she woke up. She'd hold her head in her hands, sobbing, looking in every corner of her dark room like she was waiting for something to get her. Sarah had packed away all her stuffed animals that week, two months after the crash, and Karen realized with some internal horror that Sarah had done it to prevent herself from thinking they were goblins when she woke up in the dark.

Sarah started self-inducing insomnia, making large pots of coffee after she knew Karen had fallen asleep, buying "study" pills from the older kids at school with her lunch money, never shutting the light off in her bedroom. This, however, only proved to make matters worse; Sarah would fall asleep in class and once (for it only taken it happening once for Karen to finally act) she woke up screaming at her desk, half-delirious and unresponsive to the teacher's placating tone. For three full minutes, Sarah had cried, wide-eyed, in the corner of the classroom, screaming at anyone who dared approach her. When she'd finally come to her senses, it was too late. Karen ended up forcing her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter into therapy.

Karen thought it was just a little problem, that Sarah's emotional anguish was manifesting itself in unrelated night terrors. The psychiatrists seemed to be of another opinion entirely.

"She believes it," Dr. Farley had said. When Karen told him she didn't understand, he elaborated, announcing the words to her slowly. "Mrs. Williams. _Sarah believes she went to the Labyrinth._ She said it occurred the day before the car crash." Karen couldn't believe what she was hearing. _No, that couldn't be possible._

The doctor went on to explain that Sarah's dreams were fuzzy—that she blamed the crash for jumbling her memory. She had told him she could hardly remember any details, only the main ideas. She didn't understand why she was so afraid when she woke up because she could never remember anything legitimately threatening. Dr. Farley tried to comfort Karen, to tell her that occasionally trauma can do this sort of thing to a child, despite the fact that he'd never seen a case where a child was so dead-set on insisting her dreams were reality. Karen didn't find this knowledge comforting and, on the way home from Dr. Farley's office, she told Sarah as much.

"Sarah, I have something to tell you." She took a breath. "I know you believe these things happened to you. I know there is probably nothing I can say to convince you otherwise…"

"I already told you!" Sarah broke in, "The doctor lied to you!" She had been furious that he'd told her stepmother something she'd only admitted in confidence.

"Sarah, please stop," Karen swallowed. She was driving and she couldn't cry. That wouldn't be safe. "Listen. You _will_ continue to get therapy. Not because I'm punishing you, but because I want you to get better."

"I don't need to get better! There's nothing _wrong_ with—"

"I've already lost my husband." The words quieted Sarah immediately. Karen lowered her voice, marked by emotion. "I won't lose my daughter, too."

After that, Sarah had only stipulated that she didn't return to Dr. Farley. This was something she was insistent upon. Dr. Farley had broken her trust and she wouldn't ever feel safe talking to him again. Karen understood (and frankly hadn't liked him much herself). What Karen hadn't realized was this simple change was the beginning of a pattern—a long, hectic, and exhausting pattern of doctor after doctor after doctor. The ones that Sarah agreed to meet with either proved to aggravate Karen or Sarah or both—or, most commonly, Sarah would test their limits and within a week they would inform Karen that they did not have the _patience_ to endure one Sarah Williams as a _patient._ The ones who agreed to take Sarah on despite her reputation—the notes transferred over from one doctor to another were not encouraging, since Sarah made it clear she was no longer willing to discuss the Labyrinth as anything but vague dreams—didn't last long either, mostly for the fact that they made absolutely _no_ observable progress with their patient. Sarah hated them all for various reasons—"He wears too much yellow," "He talks to me like I'm five," "She's _so_ pretentious; she said my problem was that I didn't read enough Shakespeare," "I caught him staring at my chest"—the last one made Karen rush into his office, screaming and threatening to get his license taken away.

After thousands of dollars had been spent on the problem, at the age of sixteen, Sarah finally confronted Karen.

"I can't do it anymore, Kar." The name was affectionate, which was more than Karen had come to expect from Sarah. She knew the girl would never acknowledge her as anything more than a stepmother and had determined long ago that, if that were to be her role, she would strive to excel in it. She did everything she could to show Sarah understanding, love, and loyalty. Sarah responded by showing her the same. While Sarah had never used the word, she treated Karen as one would treat a mother. And now, it seemed, she was calling on that mutual love and trust.

"Can't do what, darling?" Karen didn't look at her face as she washed the lettuce in the kitchen sink; she knew damn well what Sarah was talking about. As she broke apart the leaves, she pretended this conversation wasn't long due, but the truth is she'd begun to think the same thing herself, years ago. Only now, Sarah was asking her to do something about it.

"The therapy isn't working. It's never worked, Karen."

Mrs. Williams breathed deeply and stopped what she was doing. Shutting off the water, she turned to look at her stepdaughter. Her arms were crossed and her black hair was tied in a ponytail at the base of her neck, revealing her face to the light. Dark under-eye circles had become a permanent feature of her face. Karen couldn't remember when the girl last looked healthy. She didn't visit those memories because that would mean remembering another face—an older, masculine face.

At the thought of her husband, Karen was forced to truly reevaluate what she'd been doing with his daughter. Sarah felt tormented by having to regurgitate the memories of the crash, once a week, with stranger after stranger sitting opposite her. She felt betrayed and humiliated by having to repeat her worst nightmares to people whose "professional opinion" deemed these horrors "childish." These same people whose "professional opinions" never seemed to do a damned thing to help her daughter.

Karen took a good, hard look at Sarah's exhausted face. And there, in those dark circles, Karen got her answer. No. Her husband wouldn't want this. Sarah's father wouldn't want this.

"I know, darling." She gathered Sarah into her arms and they both began to cry. "I know."

That was the day Karen, at the unsolicited reprimanding of Dr. Collin, canceled all of Sarah's standing Wednesday afternoon appointments. It was over. If Sarah was ever going to get better, it wouldn't be thanks to the prodding and belittling of some educated hack.


	2. Bleach

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Labyrinth comes back to haunt our heroine.

Six months. It had been six blessed months since Sarah's last appointment. Now, she had just turned seventeen and her life finally seemed to be moving into a rhythm, a gentle routine that didn't include arguing with shrinks over her sanity. Her grades had even begun to improve and no one at her new school had come up with any insufferable rhymes about her personal psych history ("Sarah, Sarah/It's not fair, a/Goblin came and you aren't right/Now here they come, the men in white!")

While the dreams had persisted, she'd long ago learned to control her screams and to temper her fear. Now, life suddenly seemed almost normal. It all seemed easier. Then again, that's usually when things start to go downhill, isn't it?

"Oh! And don't forget the half-and-half! I can't have tea without it." Sarah stood in front of the open refrigerator, staring into the glowing yellow light, her body wrapped in the curly white phone cord. Karen's voice replied over the fuzzy landline.

"I'll add it to the list…Hon, tell me you haven't been dancing while we were talking? Last time I couldn't get out half the kinks you left in the cord—"

"Homework! Gotta go!" Sarah quickly replied, shutting the fridge door and hanging up just as she heard Karen sigh exasperatedly over the line. Sarah looked down at her body, tangled in a web of plastic curls. She laughed as she unhooked the phone. It hung loosely to her waist, the rest of the cord tied around her. Patiently, as the music floated steadily from the radio on the counter, she began twisting and untwisting both the cord and her body, laughing at the common predicament. Sarah knew Karen wasn't really bothered by this recurring issue; it meant Sarah was happy. Dancing in the kitchen on the phone? That was good news.

"Toby!" she called loudly from her trapped position. "Toby, lunch is in five minutes! Go get washed up!" Merlin, the dog, strutted into the room and lay down on the linoleum, watching her with amusement. She scoffed at him and stuck out her tongue. "You just love seeing me tormented, don't you?" He wagged his tail.

She finally got out the last of the kinks when she looked at the clock on the wall. She'd called Toby ten minutes ago. It wasn't a problem—after all, she'd made the sandwiches an hour ago and put them in the fridge. But he hadn't replied or come into the kitchen. He was usually excited for lunch. Turning away from the phone cord, Sarah looked down at Merlin and made a funny face. "Where, oh where, has that little boy gone?" she announced fancifully.

Sarah skipped up the stairs.

"Toby? Toby, where _are_ you?" her voice was sing-song. "This isn't the time to play hide and seek…" All at once, a familiar fear gripped at her, but she pushed it away as she always did. Little boys hid all the time and she couldn't allow herself to be paralyzed by that same terror whenever he decided he wanted to play; it wasn't fair to her nor was it fair to him.

But the fear wouldn't go away this time. Instead, it slowly slipped into the back of her mind and was replaced with a strange vigilance, an alertness of mind that was intent upon staying. Her blood was flowing with adrenaline. This wasn't normal and it only kicked up the anxiety by several notches. _Where in the hell is my brother?_

She continued down the hall, abruptly aware that she was _creeping_ , as if she were afraid to be heard. She'd stopped calling his name several moments ago, but it felt like minutes, hours even. A sound reached her ears from behind her and she whirled around. There was no one (or thing) in the hallway. Sarah turned to the closet and, with a certain degree of trepidation, held onto the knob. Counting to ten, she closed her eyes. _8…9…10!_ She tore the door open.

Relief rushed through her. Her four-year-old brother sat at the back of the closet, hunched over. But when he looked up, she was horrified. He was crying and the way he looked at her—like he expected her to be someone else. Some _thing_ else. He was happy to see her, opened his mouth to say something, but she put her finger to her lips. Quickly glancing down the hall to make sure they were alone, she leaned into the closet and whispered.

"What did it look like, Toby?" Again, he looked paralyzed with fear.

"You didn't get rid of it?" his young voice trembled. She smiled, although she felt like doing no such thing.

"Not yet. I need you to tell me what it was."

He started to sob again (she realized that's what the noise was.) "It—it looked like Tinks, but she was _mean_. She tried to cut me."

 _Tinks_. Tinker Bell.

A _fairy_ had attacked Toby.

Quickly, Sarah silenced him, telling him he needed to be _very quiet_ and not to come out while she went and had a talk with this "mean" fairy. She shut the door gently and glanced up and down the hall, making sure she paid attention to the ceiling (they could fly, after all.)

Sarah made her way back down the stairs when she was certain the fairy couldn't have gotten into any of the bedrooms—at least, she hoped it couldn't. As of now, she still couldn't fathom how it got into her _house_.

Merlin sat still on the kitchen floor, apparently privy to the fact that whatever she was up to was a very serious matter. She passed the kitchen after a cursory search from the doorway. She made her way into the living room. At first, all seemed to be right. She wanted to believe it was just Toby's overactive imagination, just as for so many years she'd desperately _wanted_ to believe it had been her own imagination at work. But it wasn't. And the fact that she'd forgotten to look at the ceiling proved this truth.

In peripheral vision, she saw a blur of yellow fly at her and she only had a moment to raise her arm against the attack. Piercing pain rippled through her, starting in her forearm. Sarah bit her lip to keep from shouting—the last thing she needed was Toby coming down to play Knight in Shining Armor. Only a moment after she'd recovered from that strike, a second bout of pain stung her right thigh. She choked this time with the pain. If it had been any less painful, she would have screamed. She was almost grateful for the intensity because all she could manage was a groan. She hear fluttering—like that of a large moth—next to her ear. A third strike then assaulted her other arm and Sarah barred her teeth. This time, she swung her arm out to fend it off, but it was met with empty air. She tried again, but as she did so, she discovered her equilibrium was thrown off and she stumbled backwards, bumping her head harshly into the wall. Obviously more vulnerable now than ever, she heard it flutter towards her and dazedly she spun around to avoid it. She was half-aware of the sound of something crashing behind her, but she had more important things on her mind than Karen's broken decorations.

When she looked up to find the creature, it was fluttering so quickly into the opposite room that she couldn't get a good look at it. She saw the blonde hair and yellow wings, but that was all. A part of her was pissed it was leaving her alone—now, she was just plain pissed. But the more rational part of her recognized that this was a well-needed reprieve to allow her to gain her bearings. Sarah gasped for air against the pressure of the pain.

Sarah moved her eyes to the wound on her arm. It was horrendous. The blade had missed her bone, but if the blow had been more centered it might have reached there. As it was, the damage was difficult to look at. Sarah couldn't understand why it didn't hurt more, but then she noticed a smear of blue along the gnash. _God, no. It poisoned me._ Even as the thought crossed her mind, she felt the nausea setting in.

As quickly as she could, she made her way to the kitchen, stumbling and gripping onto the wall halfway there. She drew herself back up and continued into the room. Merlin went up to her and she snapped her fingers, gesturing to the stairway. As if he understood, the dog bounded upstairs. She hoped he was standing guard at the closet door.

The poison was working fast, but her mind was still able to form somewhat coherent thoughts, the most urgent being that she needed to get rid of this thing before it got to Toby. The second thought was an extension of the first: How?

Throwing her mind back into that place she'd vowed never to go to, she tried to recall what Hoggle had told her about fairies…what did he tell her? She remembered being bitten by one. She remembered he said they were pests. What was he doing? _He was spraying them with something_. Her mind was in disarray and she knew if she were speaking then, her words would have been slurred. But she tried to get it to function well enough until the fairy was gone. She had to at least capture it—maybe then, she could show it to Karen? Maybe Karen wouldn't think she was insane? The thought was slipping away quickly, but it spurred her on. _This could clear my name_.

Sarah stumbled to the sink and threw open the cabinets underneath. She fell to her knees and almost gave in to the temptation to pass out right then and there. Then the face of her brother rose into her mind's eye and she shook her head violently. _No. I have to do this. You can do this, Sarah_.

She reached out for the bottle of bleach, positioned beneath the pipes, but the double vision was strong and she had to sway her hand several times to feel for it, knocking over various other bottles in the attempt. Gripping it as strongly as she could, she drew it out and set it on the counter. Going back to the cabinet, she clutched at a large tin bucket.

A minute or so later, Sarah was standing in the middle of the kitchen, belting out the slurred lyrics to Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets." _It will come_ , she told herself. _Any moment now. It hears me_.

She heard it before she saw it. Like a massive moth. The sound made her skin crawl…although maybe that was just the poison?

When it flew into the room, she was prepared to attack it immediately, but she stopped herself to get a good look. It hovered in front of her, holding a sword as long as its small body. It had long blonde hair and it was naked but for something around its hips, yet she couldn't determine its gender. The most shocking thing, however, was that it wasn't how she remembered it. Something in her dreams must have warped the memory, because she was _certain_ fairies didn't have razor teeth, evil red eyes or skeleton bone structures. She was certain the jaw frame or physique of that creature in no way represented anything remotely humanoid, as her memories recalled. This was the thing of nightmares, hissing and fluttering with its tiny sword. It was small, but god was it frightening. Just as the thought crossed her mind, its mouth opened in what might have been a battle cry (a sound not unlike a high-pitched gargling hiss) and its tongue came out. The jaw opened as if it were unhinged and the tongue was forked like a snake's. As fear slithered down her spine, the creature rushed at her.

Sarah's weakened arms drew out from behind her and, as quickly as she was able, threw the bucket of bleach-water at the monster. The bleach splashed everywhere—onto her favorite blue sweater with its rolled-up sleeves, onto the floor, onto the walls, onto the fridge with her "A" paper tacked to the front, and onto the otherworldly being which had attacked her without cause.

It screamed—distinctly animalistic in nature—and fell to the linoleum, writhing in agony. The sword must have dropped from its hand at some point and now it was simply on the floor, apparently defenseless and burning from the strong chemical. She stepped forward, thinking to put the bucket over its body to capture it, but the creature suddenly jumped up, its wings damaged from the bleach. Its legs worked fine, however, and it was running at her—faster than she imagined possible. And its hands—dear heavens, it had claws, and they were dripping with blue fluid. Right then, she knew what had to happen. She was moments from passing out as it was and one more drop of that stuff would either kill her or ensure she'd be killed in her sleep. And if that happened… _no._ She couldn't let it hurt Toby. _If this must be how it is, then so be it._

She flipped the bucket over in her hands and, just as the monster reached her feet and launched itself at her legs, she threw the object down, planting it on top of the malevolent _fairy_. The crunch was horrific. She could barely stand it—even in her poison-induced state, she felt guilt ram her in the stomach and sorrow twist in her chest. It was dead. It had to be dead.

Blue liquid slid out from under the shiny tin of the bucket and in the reflection, she saw her contorted face, like looking into a funhouse mirror. Sarah started crying hysterically. Wasn't it only ten minutes ago she was disentangling herself from the phone cord—only three feet away from where she sat now, staring at blood on the floor—because she'd been so content she habitually danced while talking on the phone? It was too surreal. Now, she was poisoned, maybe even dying, and had taken the life of a living, breathing entity.

Her sobs came in waves, her wrist coming up to cover her mouth. She didn't dare touch her face with her hand—it had bleach on it and specks of blue and red from the poisoned blood dripping down her arm. She thought then of her brother, hiding in the closet with Merlin as his loyal protector. If anything, that thought comforted her. She'd kill or die a thousand times to protect that child.

And that was her last thought as the darkness overtook her and her body fell into a limp mass onto the hard, slick, bleached linoleum. Sarah lay there with her raven hair sprawled in a mess around her head, her bleeding limbs positioned dramatically next to a puddle of cobalt fae blood like a scene in a Shakespeare play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reviews are like virtual hugs.


	3. One Flew Over the Faerie's Nest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is about other people believing Sarah to be insane. She isn't. And the following chapter is not a reflection on her reality. Just a head's up, ya'll.

The light was blinding. _Dammit,_ Sarah cursed internally. The vision she was met with when she finally was able to open her eyes made her wonder if she'd had some kind of head trauma—or if she'd been trapped in a coma for the past three years of her life. Just as she had been when Sarah had woken in a hospital after the crash, Karen was sitting in a chair next to her bed, looking for all intents and purposes like she was about to have a mental breakdown. What Sarah didn't realize was that, between the two of them, Karen wasn't the one the hospital staff expected to crack up.

" _What were you thinking?"_

Sarah blinked. Karen was livid, she could see it in her eyes, but those self-same eyes were also leaking tears. Karen let them flow as if she couldn't tell they were there—maybe she didn't. She seemed to be so enraged, nothing could distract her from her aim. And that aim, apparently, was to grill Sarah.

"Uh…" The term was really rather indelicate given the circumstances. Karen exploded.

" **WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!** " That didn't really sound like a question, but Sarah wasn't in a position to make corrections. She swallowed loudly, feeling a headache coming on.

"Kar, I'm not sure what—"

"Don't you _dare_ 'Kar' me! I'm not in the mood for you to weasel your way out of this!" Then, as fast as it came, all the anger dropped from her face, and Karen was heaving for breath, crying and shaking her head.

Sarah tried to sit up, reaching out a hand to comfort Karen, but as she did so excruciating pain rippled through her arm. She bit back a scream and leaned back into the pillows. Dazedly, her eyes traveled down to her forearm. There was a white pad taped there, with enough blood leaking through that she could tell it had been one hell of an injury. _Wait…_

_Oh. OH._

It all came flooding back to her. Before she could think over her actions, she'd bolted upright and began to ramble.

"Karen! The fairy! Agh—" she gasped against the pain, but plowed forward in spite of it and Karen's horrified face, "Tell me you found it! Did you find it? You believe me now, don't you?" she ranted excitedly. But Karen only stared, mouth open in what could only be described as earth-shattering astonishment.

"I tried to convince them they were wrong…," she murmured almost numbly.

"About the fairy?"

"About _you!_ " Karen roared, jumping from the seat. It clattered to the floor. "The nurses told me that you had been rambling about fairies and blue blood and swords and moths before they sedated you to operate on your arm. _Why would you make something like that up?_ " Then: "But you didn't, did you?" She gasped and held her mouth, one hand on her hip. She looked absolutely beside herself. "Oh, god, Sarah, tell me you don't _believe it!"_

Sarah _didn't_ believe it. Its body had been right there—and what about the poison?

"What…what happened? How did you find me?"

"You were on the floor, covered in bleach! The house looked like a war zone—broken vases, overturned tables, the whole kitchen torn apart—and you had horrible gashes in your arms and leg." Karen was speaking between sobs now.

Sarah thought fast. She could see where this was going a mile away. She cleared her throat and began to rub at her head, groaning loudly.

"Karen…I'm so sorry, you're right. I must have been confused…it must have been the injuries. I know there weren't any fairies." She hid her face. _Please be convincing, please be convincing_.

"Don't." Sarah looked up to see Karen's face, her eyes ablaze.

"You told the nurses the fairy had poisoned you." Apparently, this was one of the things she'd rambled about before they put her under. "And Sarah…the wounds." At this, Karen practically choked and turned her whole body away from Sarah, staring at the opposite wall. "The doctors told me they were self-inflicted, Sarah. I don't know what you did it with…I wish you'd tell me so I don't find it later."

Sarah felt her whole body stiffen. _No._ She'd been so close to being vindicated. Then again, who did she think she was? What? Was she going to be the girl to reveal the Underground world to the oblivious citizens of the Aboveground? She groaned internally. _Of course not. I must really_ ** _have_** _been crazy to believe that…_

"And _Toby_ ," Karen continued, crying loudly.

"What—what happened to Toby?" She swallowed. She'd killed it, hadn't she? Did it live? Is that why it wasn't found? Did it…no, it couldn't have got to Toby. _Please, God, no…_

Karen whirled around, the anger evident in her eyes again. "I can't believe you dragged him into your fantasy. I _can't believe_ you made him hide in the closet from a _fairy_. Sarah. Even if this is psychosis…you've got to be smarter than that, surely? You scared him to _death!_ " Sarah tried to ignore how condescending and ignorant that sounded. She might not be crazy, but if she _were_ , then, no, she wouldn't have "known better" than to warn her brother off from creatures that she legitimately believed to be real and dangerous.

Sarah didn't know how to process all of this. _Where had its body gone? Why didn't the doctors see the poison?_ For a moment, she considered this then realized that it wasn't as if human doctors could really detect fairy poison; they probably just thought she'd just suffered from an infection of some kind. _Oh god, what if it has long-term effects? No—I'll think about that later. There are more important things to think about right now…_

She'd done the right thing, hadn't she? She saved her brother ( _again_ ), albeit from something that technically she had brought upon them so many years ago, and she had even gone so far as to take a creature's life to protect her family. The thought nearly crushed her. She'd _killed_ something to fix all this, to make it better. She'd tried for _three years_ to forget about the Labyrinth—no thanks to her stepmother and her band of Freudian "experts." She'd been obedient (mostly) and patient (sort of). _Okay, okay, but I did better than anyone else might have given the circumstances!_ She scoffed at her own naïveté. Even to this day, she was playing the heroine and getting burned for it. Karen and Toby, too, were made to suffer for it. _Poor Karen_ , Sarah thought to herself. _She had to find me on the floor, bleeding out in her kitchen with her son trapped in the closet upstairs…_ Sarah saw the image in her mind, Karen walking into the hall with half-and-half and a gallon of milk in her grocery bags, then dropping them as the broken vase came into view—smelling the strong odor of bleach, screaming her children's names… Sarah winced. _What have I put her through?_

"They called Social Services, Sarah."

All at once, Sarah was back in the real world, her vision of Karen's terror being replaced by the very present look of horror on her face as she stood before her. It was saddened, resigned. But Sarah knew this hurt her more than she'd let on.

"They're…they're not going to take me away, are they?" Sarah's voice cracked. She could still hear the rhyme— _Sarah, Sarah, it's not fair a Goblin came and you aren't right, now here they come: the men in white!_

Karen sighed deeply and began to rub her head. Sarah held her breath. "No, Sarah. Not yet. But, if we don't start changing things…they're going to—going to—" Karen started heaving for breath again. She tried to cover her face, but it didn't work and she was pacing and sobbing as she held her stomach. Sarah hadn't seen her cry like this since the month her father had died.

Sarah didn't want Karen to be considered an unfit parent; Sarah would be institutionalized and Toby would be taken away. The only person who would take him would likely be Sarah's birth mother—and that wasn't an option. She was an Ice Queen.

That's when Sarah knew: _I'll have to cooperate this time—_ ** _really_** _cooperate_.

A knock came on the door of the room and Karen turned to it, trying to gather herself. "C—come in," she stuttered.

A man in a black suit stepped into the room and nodded to her. As he turned to Sarah on the bed, his face said that he pitied her situation—as if being in the same room as a crazy person required him to look at her with some kind of sympathy. It sickened her.

"Has your mother informed you of the agreement we've come to?"

Sarah looked to Karen, but she was staring at the opposite wall again, not wanting to see Sarah when the other shoe dropped. "No," she replied in a clear voice. If there was any dignity left to her name, she'd hold onto it for dear life, even if she felt like raging and screaming. Sarah already knew what was coming.

"The state has determined that you are a danger to yourself,"(Sarah bit back the denial—it wouldn't help her now) "and, as such, you will be seeing a specialized psychiatrist who comes highly recommended in cases similar to yours."

"Crazy little girls?" she quipped. The man frowned.

"Traumatized teenagers having difficulty coping." _Three years,_ she screamed inside. _Three years and they're still blaming this on Dad's death._ She tried to calm herself. It was difficult not to resent the timing of her father's passing; it made all of this so much more difficult. Moreover, she knew deep down that if he'd been alive, he might have been the only one who believed her…At the thought, she had to blink away tears. The timing was good because the man in black nodded sadly. _Well, if traumatized teen is an alternative to crazy little girl, I guess I'll take it._

"What's his name?" Sarah asked.

"Dr. King. He's agreed to take you on, if only for the strangeness of your case—his professional methods and interests are sometimes…," the man seemed to be searching for the right word, chewing on the phrase, before finally landing on: " _peculiar._ Hopefully, he can help you. "

In the end, Sarah's stepmother convinced the state to let Sarah stay at home, only by insisting that she had never been a danger to others and, while she obviously hurt herself, this was the first time. Now that she was getting "help," entering her into a facility would be unnecessary.

As she walked back into her bedroom that weekend after being discharged from the hospital, Sarah looked in her mirror with a painful calmness. This was going to hurt, she knew as much. She'd have to lie but she'd have to do so at the same time as copping to her dreams (experiences) about the Labyrinth. They wouldn't put up with her pretending she'd never admitted her beliefs all those years ago in Dr. Farley's office. Now, they'd want every painful detail. From this point forward, it would be hell.

Staring at her own young, haggard reflection, Sarah determined to try for her stepmother and for Toby, but she knew what no one else seemed to be able to grasp: No shrink can help what haunts her.


	4. The Thin White Duke...or is it King?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah meets her new shrink.

He smokes.

In the office.

_He smokes in the office_.

Oh, hell no.

Sarah ground her teeth as she stood at the doorway. The name engraved in black, glossy letters on the wooden plaque hung at eye level, mocking her predicament.

She had been so close. No—not close. She'd been _there_. She was _free_. And then, the Labyrinth came back to haunt her, bubbled up out of her own personal hell and dragged her back into the very same mess she'd been fighting to be free of for three torturous years.

_Dr. J. King, M.D._

And the worst part wasn't that she was being forced ( _again_ ) to see a psychiatrist. No, no. The worst part, by far, was the fact that she could smell the damned cigarette smoke seeping under the door into her lungs. She freaking hated smokers. Dr. Collin had been a smoker. Her nose scrunched up of its own volition, muscle memory kicking in at the thought of Dr. Collin's malodorous habits.

Sarah glared at the name on the plaque. The secretary had told her which hallway to go down. She'd instructed her to just knock and walk in.

Well, she wasn't ready yet. She'd just…stand here. Just a few seconds more. Sarah wanted to take all of her excess fury out on the plaque bearing his name before she had to face the man himself.

She could already imagine it: A man in his forties, balding prematurely, with a crooked nose, greasy skin, and a beer gut, wearing scratchy colorful tweed smelling of stale Lucky Strikes. _Unorthodox_ , the social services agent had said, with _peculiar interests_. _Pfft. That's probably just code for "creepy."_ Mentally, she bet herself he was some kind of chauvinistic asshole, too, like Dr. Greeley—taking quick glances at her chest or asking her to "lie down, close your eyes, and relax" while he paced around the Chaise lounge, ogling her without her explicit knowledge. Sarah instinctively stuck out her tongue, gagging, and winced at the thought. After all, no one could see her.

"Finding something particularly unsavory, Sarah?"

She jumped away from the door as if she'd been burned. There was a man leaning against the hallway wall, looking at her in the dim lighting. He must have been very quiet to have arrived without her knowledge. And...did he call her Sarah? _Yep. And he did it with a British accent._

She bristled at the idea that her case had already become fodder for gossip at this little practice. _"Did you hear?" "What?" "Oh, my new patient, Sarah Williams. She thinks a_ ** _fairy_** _tried to kill her! HAHAHA!" "No. Really? HA! Edward, come here! Did you hear about Dr. King's new patient?"…_

"Who the hell are you?" she spat out, the remnants of her fear picture clinging to her mind like a viscous poison. She was determined now, utterly set upon hating this _Dr. King_.

But the man across the hall stepped out from under the shadow of the broken light above him, into the dim white glow. He smiled and the look of it nearly killed her—she imagined that must be what she was feeling. It was painful how lovely he looked…how _kind_ he looked. Suddenly, Sarah struggled to remember when someone had last been _kind_ to her, someone other than her stepmother or Toby or Merlin. Someone who wasn't all but required to love her. This man was truly giving her a look of kindness—not pity like the social services agent, not concern like the medical doctors, not condescension like all those shrinks from her past—but true, honest, authentic _kindness_.

She started to stutter, saying absolutely nothing yet feeling the need to—what, apologize? She'd been completely rude, yet here he was, just…grinning. Sarah looked him up and down. He was wearing a starched white shirt with a brown pinstriped jacket, matching pants, and saddle shoes. The collar was stiff and pointed (as was the style) and his hair—an unnatural shade of red—was slicked back, not a strand out of place. His face was perfectly symmetrical—a straight nose and a wide grin—but for his two differently-colored eyes, as far as she could see in the hazy lighting. Despite the symmetrical quality of his face, however, she could see a depth there that spoke beyond the apparent youth of his features. Even in this dingy hallway in a psychiatric practice for lost causes, this sharp, thin stranger looked… _regal_.

As her eyes roamed over his figure, they eventually came to fall on his hands—one of which was in his pant pocket and the other which was raised. All at once, her unbidden warmth for this man came to an abrupt halt. In between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he held a cigarette. Her face turned to stone and her mouth shut with a snap. She understood immediately. _**This**_ **,** she thought with venom, _is Doctor King._

His eyebrows raised, crinkling his smooth forehead. "Well," he chuckled good-humoredly. " _That_ was brief."

"What was?" she ground out.

He stalked towards her and she instinctively backed up several feet. But he wasn't approaching her; he stopped at the door, turned his shoulder to her, put the cigarette in his mouth, pulled a key out of his jacket pocket, and unlocked the door. With an odd sense of precision, he removed the cigarette from between his lips and, as he looked over his shoulder to speak to her, the smoke leaked out of his smirk: "For a moment there, it looked like you might actually give me a chance." He grinned again, not seeming at all put out by her suddenly cold disposition. "My mistake."

He shrugged and pushed the door open, standing there with one hand holding that blasted cigarette and the other holding open the door. He stood there, waiting. Sarah didn't move. Patiently, he took a drag from the thing between his fingertips and blew the smoke into the space between them.

After a beat, he raised an eyebrow. "Well. Sarah, I am going to go inside. It is up to you to join me. The hallway smells of Dr. Moore's stale discount tobacco and the lighting hurts the eyes. Also," he made a show of looking up and down the frankly claustrophobic-inducing area, "I don't see any comfortable furniture. You could try the floor, but it hasn't been cleaned in several years…" He didn't look her in the eye as he made all these observations and the rant was getting under Sarah's skin. Finally, she huffed loudly and brushed past him into the office. As she did so, she could see him smile.

Honestly, having to pass him in such close proximity made her somewhat lightheaded—he was right about the tobacco smell not belonging to him; he smelled of something else entirely, something not found in cologne and certainly not in stale cigarettes. She swallowed and determined to hold her breath through the whole session if she had to. There wasn't a chance in hell he'd make her like him, not with charm, not with wit, and not with whatever made his aura so damn intoxicating.

For a moment, she considered collapsing into the chair behind his desk—she'd done that with a few doctors just to see how they'd react. It became something of a game for her, using psychological tactics against the very people who were supposed to be picking _her_ apart. But before she got a chance to decide, he'd shut the door, brushed past her (there was the dizzy spell again) and sat in a comfortable-looking chair on the other side of the room.

Sarah stared.

Next to him was a small coffee table, covered in papers. She glanced back at the desk and chair against the adjacent wall; it was completely clear, not even a name plaque.

"I only keep files in the drawers."

Her head whipped back to look at him, but he didn't meet her gaze. _So he doesn't use his desk?_ she pondered. She took a few steps toward him, still uncertain about where to sit or what to do. Usually, she'd do the very thing they least expected—but here, it didn't seem _anything_ was expected of her. She took another tentative step forward.

He was leaning forward with a manila folder in his hands, reading over some notes. As she got closer, she recognized the handwriting as that of Dr. Greeley. And, under that page, she recognized Dr. Hoffman's handwriting, as well. He flipped a sheet of paper. And another. In fact, it seemed this new doctor of hers was not all that interested in what her previous doctors had to say about her condition because he was taking hardly any time at all to read their thoughts—either that, or he'd already been through them and was doing this for show. Sarah suspected it was the latter.

Sarah's eyes fell on the chair across from him. It looked comfortable enough and it seemed he was willing to put them on equal ground: no desk separating them, no demeaning Chaise lounge, no assigned seat placing her in the submissive state of being some self-important prick's "patient"…

Sighing, she finally sat down across from him. Still, however, he didn't look up. That was beginning to bother her.

"You look a little young to be a psychiatrist."

Still, no answer.

Eventually, after several minutes, Dr. King placed the cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table, filled with at least half a dozen other cigarette butts. With the file still open on his lap, he raised his head to meet her stoic gaze.

"Sarah—"

"I didn't give you permission to call me by my given name." She'd said it automatically; she said that to all her doctors, since she'd seen Dr. Reacher.

The eyebrows shot up again. With his eyes now trained on hers, however, she noticed that his eyes weren't two different colors, but that one of his pupils was larger than the other. She'd once seen someone else with eyes like those…but she _just couldn't place it_. The thought was quickly slipping away from her mental grasp, but the discomfort stayed behind, taunting her quietly. For a moment, she tried to recall where they were in the conversation—oh, that's right. He'd called her _Sarah_.

Sarah raised her chin defiantly, feeling a bit like a child. "One of my _former psychiatrists_ ," the words were scathing, "was of the opinion that calling his patients by their first names only came _after_ they'd established trust." She paused, watching as a smirk played at his lips. She fought the urge to growl. "And I don't trust you, _Dr. King._ "

"Yet." The answer was quick to bounce back. He was so quick, in fact, that Sarah had trouble catching on to what he was saying.

"Sorry?"

"You don't trust me _yet,_ " he drawled. Sarah blanched. Then, she laughed.

"Just so you know…Dr. Collin never got to call me Sarah." She paused. "I saw him for a year and a half."

Dr. King didn't seem fazed. He merely looked back down at the file in his hand and thumbed through several pages. Without looking back up, he mumbled almost absentmindedly, "Yes…it appears you've been seeking help—"

" _Karen_ has been sending me. I'm not _seeking help_." His eyes slid up, then back down to the paperwork without raising his head.

"…for three years. You've seen twelve—"

"Thirteen, now."

"…psychiatrists." He paused, raising his head again. "Perhaps thirteen is your lucky number?" Sarah wondered then if maybe, in looking through the notes of some of her former doctors, he'd discovered that number's meaning and was now intentionally using it to torment her. She decided not to answer the question, so he continued.

"Why didn't you like them?"

She shrugged. This was a fairly innocuous question and one she would be _very happy_ to oblige. "Various reasons. One of them loved curry. The other wore too much yellow. One in particular had a theory that my dreams were indicative of _sexual awakening_." She sneered and to her surprise, he wryly smiled.

"…and you said?"

" _Bullshit._ " He burst out laughing, a gorgeous grin with laugh lines forming around his mouth and eyes. That wasn't the reaction she expected from using foul language in his office and she fought the urge to be impressed. His laughter entranced her, in spite of her internal mantra reminding her that she was supposed to hate him. Eventually, he regained composure. He sighed heavily.

"Now, _Miss Williams._ Tell me." She had no idea what he was about to ask, but from the look on his face it wouldn't be a question she liked. "What is _really_ wrong?"

That was not a question she'd ever been asked. At least, not the way he asked it—for the first time, it'd not been asked with the attitude as if the presupposition were that the doctor already knew perfectly well what was "wrong": _Her_. Seeing that Dr. King was completely serious in his sincerity, Sarah couldn't help but laugh. She was incredulous. _Finally_ _a question that presumes I'm in possession of my mental faculties._ "Nothing!" she pantomimed around her animatedly, as if everything around her—the building, the degrees on his wall, the files on his desk, even the city sitting just outside the window—were all completely ridiculous. Both his eyebrows rose.

"Nothing? Nothing, tra la la?"

He'd said it with humor, a smirk on his lips, but her hands froze midair. _Did—did he just say…?_

Sarah felt the room reel. The floor must have been curved because she felt the ground sway beneath her feet, as if it were rolling off the third story of the building, on the verge of plummeting to level ground and taking her and Dr. King with it. She tried to remind herself that she was planted in a chair, in a room, in the _Aboveground_. But those words were too familiar and the voice…his voice had sounded so _alike_ to _his_. She tried to swallow, tried to shut her eyes, but she felt paralyzed. If there was anything Dr. Lane had taught her, it was how to fend off this kind of panic—she took a deep breath that Dr. King must have mistaken for a sigh and carefully took stock of her physical presence, checking inventory. Her feet, her legs, her stomach...

Completely oblivious to his patient's internal panic, Dr. King shut the paperwork, set it aside, and leaned forward onto his knees.

"Miss Williams, I will tell you right here and now. I am not going to treat you like you are insane for the things you are about to tell me. For here and now…this is just a story. You needn't even treat them as if they happened to you, as if you believe them. You just talk. Explain the _dreams_ , the things that _bother you_. You can make some of it up, or none of it. You know why I am asking you to be free like this?"

She shook her head, trying to dispel the horror that had crept into her bones at his previous words. She could hardly comprehend the things he was saying and she tried to regain her bearings, to shake off the confusion and hear the words he was using. He continued, speaking with the strength and pace of a skilled orator, drilling them into her.

"Because even the things a person makes up is indicative of how they feel, what the underlying problem is. I'm telling you my process so that you _trust_ me, because evidently, that is problem you have."

She was about to protest, but he put his hand up before she could find her voice. "Hold on. I'm not done yet, Miss Williams. Because I'm allowing you to tell your story however you may please, you needn't fear about lying and I needn't feel betrayed if you do—and I would, as would any individual. I won't mislead you into the common lie that somehow psychiatrists are capable of suspending their most human aspects, because that deception is unhelpful in our situation. I'm human and am susceptible to human emotions. We are entering into a relationship here—if you'll have me," he joked, grinning, "and that relationship, professional as it may be, is as tenuous as any relationship between imperfect creatures. Eventually, however, I hope you _will_ trust me. And that starts with honesty on my side and the presupposition of _dishonesty_ on yours." _That_ kicked her back into reality.

"So, what?" she growled," You just _assume_ I'm going to lie anyway so you might as well give me permission to do it?" Sarah found that both patronizing and offensive. But he smiled anyway, his eyes kind.

"No, Miss Williams. I'm asking you to tell the story how you feel most comfortable doing it so _you_ don't feel afraid that I won't believe you. You already assume I won't. If anything, it is _your_ presumption that is most offensive." He was still smiling. She tried to process this. "And here's a thought, Williams: If you lie, I will be able to determine what the real problem is—why would someone lie about something of this nature? If you believe it, I'll be able to see that there is a problem there, as well. And it is a place for us to start—from the beginning." She glared over his shoulder, determining not to look him in the eyes. " _However_." He paused and she felt his eyes on her as if they were burning her skin, "While these may have been the only two viable options for your past dozen doctors, I will not be ruling out the third possibility." Her eyes immediately went to his. _Do you mean…?_ "I will _not_ be assuming from the start that your story is inherently impossible."

While she wanted to believe him—she really did—it was too much to hope for. She scoffed despite herself. "For your attempts to make me trust you, your _honesty_ is pretty pathetic. We both know you'd never think I was telling the truth—"

"Which is _exactly_ why," he interrupted, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs, "we are entering into this relationship with the allowance that you may, at will, lie to me. You don't think I'll believe you either way. So, go on, Williams," he waved a hand at her flippantly, "Tell me. Because if it is a lie, you won't have betrayed my trust and you won't feel dirty by having told me. If you believe a fantasy, you will have felt at ease telling me because I won't assume straightaway that you're insane—maybe a liar, but not insane. And, if you _are_ , by some miracle, _telling the truth_ …," he lowered his head and considered her with intensity, "Then, Miss Williams, have you considered that this might be the most compelling reason to get help?"

She lowered her eyebrows, both angry and _again_ , not following his train of thought. He sighed impatiently at her lack of understanding, _tut-tut-tutting_ under his breath as he readjusted himself in his armchair.

"If you truly _were_ abducted and forced to run a maze to save your brother's life at the age of fourteen, if you _were_ attacked by an otherworldly creature then made to take its life…I'd say that is a rather valid reason to see a shrink." His face broke into a grin again, laughing this time, with a hint of sadness in his voice. He leaned his head on his fingers. The man was a fidgeter and his facial expressions were near-maniacal. She also realized with a bit of a jolt, that he was _right_. And it aggravated her.


	5. Atlantis in Her Mind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sarah makes a decision.

**_Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?_ **   
**_Hot ashes for trees?_ **   
**_Hot air for a cool breeze?_ **   
**_Cold comfort for change?_ **   
**_Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?_ **

Her head fell forward, a sinking motion, a lulling sway, the pendulum of the dead weight in her skull.

**_We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year._ **

This was her life now. Homework, family, shame, and therapy.

Pink Floyd spun in the record player. The cover was thrown on the floor. Unopened textbooks sat passively face-down beside it, layered atop one another like a badly-prepared game of Jenga.

She'd spent the past month speaking to Dr. King twice a week. She'd nearly managed to ignore half the truth, but somehow he always found a way to drag it out of her, as if he could tell she was holding something back.

She hated it.

Sarah hated that she could sit in his office and he'd nod as if he actually cared about silly things like the Bog of Eternal Stench—a thing that he only pursed his lips at, as if he found the whole concept greatly distasteful.

 _"_ _Dr. Collin said it was indicative of my self-loathing," she'd said._

 _"_ _I thought we'd already established that Dr. Collin was a twat."_

She laughed then, only to hate herself a moment later for it. She wondered vaguely if perhaps Dr. Collin had actually had a point…

Frankly, talking to Dr. King had done her some good. Those past years, she'd spent her time trying to force out the memories and sew her lips shut in the presence of any "professional." They'd been preserved, frozen in her head like relics of a past civilization. Atlantis in her mind. The Labyrinth as a ruin.

And now, he was the archeologist. The feelings she had been too young to comprehend began to surface. She remembered her wanderlust, her desire for change and excitement. She also remembered the acute loneliness that had been the baseline of her childhood. Had any of the other doctors ascertained such things, they might have used them to establish motive for her subconscious (or conscious) mind to develop the fantasy of the Labyrinth. Dr. King, however, only nodded.

In fact, he nodded so much and spoke so little that Sarah was wondering if he was ever going to speak at all. Clearly the State believed she needed some _adjusting_ , but up until this point all he'd done was _observe._

It was nerve-wracking.

These were the things Sarah thought of as she sat on her bed, cross-legged, breathing deeply. Her eyes were closed. Her body was still. Life around her didn't exist; she needed her peace.

All that she was at that moment was the onlooker, the witness to her own life. She was watching her conversation with Dr. King yesterday morning in her mind.

 _"_ _Is that all?"_

_She'd cocked her head at him, at his calm yet questioning demeanor. "I said that was it, didn't I?"_

_He narrowed his eyes at her. "I don't appreciate liars, Sarah. The whole point of this exercise was to give you the freedom to prevent you from feeling the need to lie to me."_

_"_ _What makes you think I'm lying?" she spoke indignantly._

 _"_ _I know you are." There was a brief, tense moment following this exchange._

 _"_ _Why don't you ever give me any feedback? I feel like I'm just spilling my guts to thin air."_

 _Yellow suit, wingtip oxfords, lazy demeanor, slow grin. Cheshire. His eyebrows rose high on his sharply-angled face. "Perhaps I'd give you feedback if you were_ _**actually** _ _spilling your guts, Miss Williams. Seeing as we both know your insides have remained very clearly intact this entre time, I don't see the point in commenting on half-truths."_

Nerve-wracking.

Nerve-wracking because he wasn't supposed to know she was lying. No one was supposed to know she was lying; they were supposed to assume she was insane, not that she was tucking away some of the delusion.

But, as it seemed he had a knack for, Dr. King was quite right. She _was_ hiding something, something she had no desire to "spill."

There was one thing she'd never told any of them, not even Dr. Farley that first fateful meeting.

She never told them about Jareth.

It was a ridiculous thing to try to tell the story of the Labyrinth without even once mentioning the Goblin King, since he was the perpetrator of the crime that sent her into the Labyrinth to begin with. Moreover, he was at every turn and twist of the narrative. Nevertheless, she did her best. She blamed the kidnapping on the goblins, void of a leader. She suggested that the Labyrinth had a mind of its own and was certainly not following the nefarious suggestions of any single entity. She would describe the end as her sneaking into the Labyrinth to find Toby and stealing him away from under the goblins' noses. The peach was left undiscussed, as with a series of other incidents which required by necessity an appearance from Jareth.

In actuality, it wasn't so difficult to tell that Sarah was leaving something big out of her story. Attempting to tell anyone anything about the Labyrinth without Jareth's involvement left the history sounding disjointed and difficult to follow. She'd have loved to blame the assumption of her insanity on her inability to fully explain her experiences, but leaving out any mention of Jareth is likely what ultimately _saved_ her from the White Room. Monsters, malignant faeries, kidnappers, and talking doorknockers were nothing compared to _an_ _androgynous glitterazi tyrant pedophile_.

Those were, of course, her English teacher's words, not her own.

Sarah had been able to bury every other thought but that of _him_. Talking about him was not an option; she certainly could not talk about him to any of her many revolving-door shrinks. She couldn't tell her stepmother. She had no true friends to speak of. It was only natural, then, that her mind would find another avenue, even if without her express conscious permission.

In the end, it was her writing out of which Jareth emerged. He became a recurring character in her strangest and wildest stories—very few, if any, of which featured the Labyrinth. Jareth the Goblin King would pose under even more absurd pseudonyms, cast as a hero, an antihero, a villain, and an unimportant minor personality in mundane or fantastical settings. But never was he "Jareth" and never was he in the "Underground"; if he resembled that character, it was in tangential ways and if the setting seemed too familiar, it was never described in such detail that definitive parallels could be drawn.

When Sarah initially found that she had been writing about him, it was months after her first four short stories involving him. She'd tricked her own mind into not recognizing the Goblin King (it helped that she could only remember his dress code, a thing she disregarded altogether in her early pieces.) But, months later, it was clear as day. The personalities rising before her eyes as she drank in her own words on the pages were so easily recognizable as _his_ —as facets of _his_ vacillating character.

That first time she recognized what she'd done, she shredded the pages by hand.

Hours later, she found herself crying quietly on the floor, carefully piecing them back together with Scotch tape.

She didn't know why; she didn't _want_ to know why. All she knew was that writing about him calmed her, reminded her that she wasn't insane. She couldn't remember much else properly, but she would always remember the monarch who offered her his service in exchange for forever ( _"It's not very long at all..."_ )

When she finally got around to writing _their_ story (or part of it, at least), it became the first story she'd written for her class that her teacher found impossible to swallow.

 _"_ _Sarah, I don't understand. Your work has shown such promise. I was going to recommend you enter your work into a contest."_

 _"_ _You don't think I should now?"_

 _"_ _No, no. That's…" Mr. Gomez heaved a sigh, ran his fingers through his greased-back hair. He was a handsome man, but he used far too much product. "That's not it. I just find this particular piece disturbing. You're describing an ambiguously older man offering himself to a teenage girl."_

_Sarah couldn't help but laugh, her eyebrows tilted in an expression of disbelief. "Not—not like that, Mr. Gomez! He's offering his love, his life."_

_Mr. Gomez leveled his gaze with hers, leaning over his desk with an air of total sincerity tinted with unintentional condescension. "Sarah…tell me you're not that naïve?"_

_She scoffed. "It's a fantasy story. The real Cinderella story has the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to try to fit into the glass slipper. It's just a story, Mr. Gomez."_

_"_ _Yes, and if I had met the sick—" Mr. Gomez caught his own tongue on the verge of an unsavory word, "…sick_ _**individual** _ _who had imagined that folk story at its genesis, I'd say he or she likely had some mental issues, to say the least."_

 _"_ _So…you're telling me I have some_ _**mental issues?** _ _"_

_Mr. Gomez stared back at her, knowing her fear and anger at the idea of being called unstable or insane. She'd dealt with it for years. Mr. Gomez had moved schools nearly as often as she had and those schools tended to coincide. With the exception of one semester, she always had a class with Mr. Gomez. He knew she trusted him with her work, her deepest thoughts. Calling her insane was not his goal._

_"_ _No, Sarah. I'm telling you that it_ _**worries** _ _me."_

She kept writing her stories, though. It wasn't that she necessarily _wanted_ to; she was addicted. It was like she _needed it_. And he kept reading them, despite her not taking his class in her most recent semester. She'd drop them off with him at his office and he'd suggest (in vain) that she send some of her older work into literary magazines. When she'd come back to give him a new one later in the week, he'd hand her back the previous piece, the pages littered with commentary in red pen. The most recently memorable comment he made was that her character was a control freak, power-hungry, probably sociopathic, and manipulative. Mr. Gomez was still concerned and made that known, but he also had a sense of humor; he jokingly called her stories the "Glitterazi King Chronicles."

In her stories, she fought with him. Sometimes she won, sometimes she didn't. But she could at least _speak_ to him.

Sarah never quite understood what it was about Jareth that confused her. He was unambiguously the villain of her true story—of the nightmare that nearly robbed her of her brother and, if her muddied memories served, had succeeded in robbing her of her childhood even before the car crash took what was left of her unpolluted happiness.

Yet he was also the thing that felt most solid in those memories. He was the thing that felt the most solid at night when she'd shut her eyes to sleep. The thing that felt most solid in the daytime. The most solid thing out of anything at all.

Jareth was the only thing that convinced her she wasn't insane; she could feel him, feel the reality of him, the reality of those memories which featured him. The times when she had questioned her own sanity (and of course, she had) she had invoked his memory. Something was wrong with that, but she couldn't understand what it was that didn't jive right.

He was her secret sanity. The anchor in her Atlantis. And she was the boat weathering the waves above her childhood ruin.

And now she sat on her bed, determining why all these things were crossing her mind.

She didn't want to; he hadn't earned it.

One month.

That wasn't long enough by anyone's standards to bare one's soul.

It was more than just that she had promised to cooperate this time that had her considering this… _impossibility_. It was that something about Dr. King made her think, begrudgingly, that perhaps (if Mr. Gomez was right and Jareth was an unhealthy character in her life) Dr. King could help her untangle those psychological knots.

Sarah wanted to know why she still dreamt of the Goblin King. Moreover, Sarah wanted to know why her dreams of the Goblin King were the only dreams that didn't leave her screaming when she woke.

**_Wish you were here._ **

The song spun to an end and Sarah's eyes opened to her bedroom wall.

Tomorrow, she'd tell the Doctor about her King.


	6. A Small Incision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sarah tries to explain the Labyrinth in greater detail to her psychiatrist, Dr. King.

_i_

When Sarah arrived to therapy the next day, she stood outside his doorway an extra five minutes.

She breathed through her nose. She was not sure how to do this, how to even start this conversation. Something about even _talking_ about the Goblin King seemed inherently wrong. She'd made rules up the night before on what to and what not to say. His name and his title were two things that were off-limits, forbidden territory. She was intent upon proving she wasn't insane, but not so intent that she would consider bringing the nightmare to Dr. King's office. She needed him to give her the psychological okay, not to make others question his own sanity should she give him irrefutable proof to support her story.

 _Maybe they'd think it was contagious and quarantine us_. She smiled to herself.

The hallway reeked of tobacco. She was late as it was, but she wasn't ready for this yet.

_Maybe I can tell him I'm feeling sick. Come back tomorrow, just put it off a day._

"Miss Williams," his voice came, muffled, through the door. She bit back a groan, wincing. "Are you planning on coming in any time soon?"

Hand on the doorknob, she swung the door open to find Dr. King settled on his little sofa, looking for all intents and purposes like a reclined cat. Completely at ease. Demure. Unbothered by her tardiness or by anything else, really.

She took a few quick steps into the room, realized at his pointed look that she'd left the door wide open, went back to shut it…and stood facing the shut door with a feeling akin to panic. Counting the lines in the wood within her view, she stayed stock still.

"Would you like to sit down?" he chuckled from behind her. Sarah nodded, but didn't move for a moment. After several seconds, she finally turned to walk toward him, stiffly taking her seat.

This was the beginning of a good three-minute staring contest.

He won.

She blinked rapidly and shifted in her seat, glancing anywhere but at him.

"Miss Williams."

She didn't respond.

"Miss Williams, are you _alright?_ "

_Now or never. Just spit it out._

"I've decided to tell you…something."

"Something?" his eyebrow rose on cue, his fingers laced together as impeccably as his wide red tie was knotted.

The window was open today. The cool breeze wafted through the room and brushed against her face, hot with anticipation of her own words.

Sarah looked down. Her loose baby blue sweater was pulled down over her thumbs, twisted in her palms. She didn't really want to talk about this. She'd fluctuated the past 24 hours over whether or not this was even a good idea.

But she wanted his opinion, if only because he seemed to be the first therapist/doctor/psychologist/anyone she'd met who hadn't treated her as if she were insane and who at least listened without being demeaning or coldly clinical in his attitude. There were so many reasons Sarah resented Dr. King, but few of them were his own fault. She resented him because Karen thought he was actually helping—and because Sarah knew there was no help to be had. She resented that she was being forced to see him and there was nothing she wanted more than to prove to everyone that such circumstances were incapable of yielding a positive result. She resented that he was quiet and when he did speak, he spoke to her with sarcasm. But she did, oddly enough, trust his opinion. And that was really what she needed now: a different perspective.

She persisted in staring at her hands as she spoke. "Yes…I wanted to let you know that you were right."

"Was I?" his response was instant and though she was studying her fingers, she could hear the smile in his voice.

"Yes," she ground out. "You were. I lied."

"About?"

"About…" Sarah paused. Swallowed. Glanced up, fearfully, as if she'd see the cat-who-got-the-cream expression on his face. Instead, he had his eyebrows raised in open curiosity. No derision. No surprise. No judgment . "About the whole thing, actually."

Dr. King sighed and rearranged himself in his sofa seat, the foot at the end of his crossed leg twitching to an unheard beat. Sarah watched the toe of his oxford, at his minor fidgeting. His voice drew her eyes back up to his. "Honestly, Sa—Miss Williams, I thought we'd already covered this. Trying to convince me you never believed in the Labyrinth to begin with is a waste of time. I thought we'd agreed—"

"No! No, no," she interrupted him quickly. "That's not what I meant. What I meant is that…that I've lied about how the whole thing came about."

"And how did it come about?"

"It started with—I mean, it started with _him_." That was _not_ what she'd meant to say.

His eyes shot to meet hers. Whenever he did this (as he occasionally had throughout her narrative) Sarah felt as if the whole room melted beyond them. Everything else was smudged, like frosted glass, and the only thing she could see clearly were his _eyes_ , his strange half-dilated eyes. She didn't see it happen, but she realized a moment into being drawn in—into that subtle hypnotism—that he had slowly leaned forward and there was now less than a foot between their faces. She breathed shallowly.

She hadn't meant it to come out so vague. She meant to say, "There was a magical king who brought me there and that's why the story sounds weird. What do you think about him?" She certainly hadn't anticipated Dr. King seeming so…attentive, if that's even how it might best be described.

"Tell me," he ordered, his voice deep and low.

Her voice faltered, "Tell—tell you? All over again?"

"Tell me. _Properly_."

"Did I tell you _improperly_ to begin with?" she asked defensively.

He still was drilling holes into her eyes.

"Sarah, start from the beginning."

She didn't want to start from the beginning. She wanted to continue to be vague, to only tell him the most overarching details. She didn't want him to _know_.

He shook his head minutely, as if knowing her thoughts. "Tell me the truth. Tell me how you felt. And tell me _all_ of it."

_ii_

_[In Sarah's Own Words]_

Okay.

Imagine for a moment that you're fourteen.

The things in the world that most annoy you are silly and stupid. You wish you had more time to do those silly, stupid things. You're lonely, but you won't ever admit that because you probably don't understand enough of how you feel to be aware of the word for it.

For the same reason, you can't really explain why you hate your brother, but you do. After all this therapy, I had to figure it out for myself. I thought I was being replaced. My mother wasn't a fantastic person and she didn't stick around. But here was Karen, and she loved my dad and had a kid for him and it was like everything she did, she did _right_. I hated that. I hated that my own mother couldn't have been like that. It made me hate her even more when she tried to show me that she wanted me to like her. Because my mom had never tried to get me to like her. The one thing a biological mother was supposed to do better than the step-mom, Karen outdid my mother in. She was a wife-upgrade for my dad. She was a mom-upgrade for me, even if I hated it. So, it only stood to reason (in my kid head) that Toby, her kid, would grow up to be the _me-upgrade_. My replacement. The better, cooler, new-and-improved Sarah Williams. So there was that.

And I had this book—the one I told you about. It was a storybook about a kingdom called the Underground with a magnificent Labyrinth in it. What I didn't mention was that it was ruled by a King. It seems obvious now that I was lying. I mean, what kind of kingdom doesn't have a King? Then again, I was hoping you weren't looking for the logic in my so-called delusion. It is a little annoying, by the way, that you're a human polygraph.

Anyway, there was this King. He ruled the Labyrinth. And the book said if you called on him, he would have his goblins take away whoever you asked him to get rid of. I didn't really believe in it. I may have been a fourteen-year-old still reading kid's books, but I wasn't—well, delusional. I said it because Toby was pissing me off and I wanted to feel, for just one moment, that I actually had some control over my life.

So I called on him.

That's when he showed up—he _actually_ showed up. I didn't think he would, obviously. But he did. Part of me was really excited. Then I realized that he'd shown up to take Toby.

I wasn't excited anymore.

I was scared.

I pretended for a few minutes that it was okay, that I was in control. That it was just like the book; if I just acted like I was playing make-believe, I could save my brother. I mean, that's how I got into the mess to begin with, so I figured that was how I could get out.

Everything about the situation felt like a storybook. I can't remember much in the beginning. But I do remember that he was full of tricks. He was bright and dark all at once—like the moonlight and darkness just _surrounded_ him. He shined and sparkled. I remember him being dressed in a pretty funky get-up, but that's the point I'm trying to make, I think. He was like a fairytale. So, I approached the problem as if it were a fairytale.

Looking back, I guess I should've taken things a little more seriously, given what he turned out to be. He was ruthless and cruel. He was also belittling. You could just tell he had an ego the size of Canada.

Yeah, sorry, I know I'm going on about him. That's really beside the point, though.

I challenged him, asked him what I needed to do to get Toby back. And he told me, pretty plainly after a few magical tricks meant to freak me out, that I had to run his maze.

He threw a fucking snake at me and it turned out to be a scarf—okay, yeah, that was irrelevant.

The moment I said yes, he told me I had thirteen hours—that's where that arbitrary number came from, now you know. I didn't just say: "Gee, I think I'm going to give myself a _thirteen hour deadline to find my toddler brother._ I'm sure he'll be okay for thirteen hours! Now, to figure out this maze…" Yeah, no.

So, yeah, he magicked me to the Underground, set the alarm clock, and sent me on my merry way.

That's how it really started. That's how it all happened. With some magical, egotistical, demeaning, eerie being who wasn't even really supposed to exist.

**_And what did he look like?_ **

_iii_

Sarah jolted out of her reverie. "What?"

Dr. King's eyes were intense, boring into hers. She felt herself shrinking into her seat. "What did he _look_ like?"

Sarah blinked. "I told you. He was Mr. Glitter." Dr. King didn't laugh or scoff as she'd expected he would.

"What did he _look_ like? Not his clothing, his _face_."

Sarah's eyebrows twitched. Her eyes languidly opened and shut. She shook her head, her hair sliding over her shoulders. Her head facing downward, she screwed her eyes together. Her voice came out softly: "I don't—I don't remember."

She expected him to accuse her of lying. _She_ would've thought she was lying if she were on the outside looking in.

Instead, she heard only silence. When she opened her eyes again, he had leaned back against the sofa, his hands in his lap, his eyes shut and head facing the ceiling. His legs were crossed again, but she could sense the tenseness in his shoulders, in his whole demeanor. He looked as if he were meditating, but he was really subsiding, uncoiling. She wondered if he was angry with her, if something she'd said was aggravating to him.

All at once, his eyes were open and he was sitting upright, staring directly at her. She jerked at the unsettling abruptness of it. But he wasn't looking _at_ her; he was looking _through_ her.

His voice sounded almost disembodied as he intoned that perhaps they should call it a day.

She nodded, feeling somehow faint.

His gaze didn't waver as she left her seat. She stepped carefully to the doorway, her hand somehow shaking as it reached for the knob. She looked over her shoulder, at once uncomfortable yet reluctant to leave.

He was still frozen in the same position when the door to his office clicked shut.

_iii_

Dr. King cancelled the next appointment, citing a flu. As Karen hung up the phone and turned to tell her, Sarah numbly nodded.

But all through dinner that night, she felt a phantom fear in her stomach. She wasn't sure why it bothered her—maybe it was because she'd _actually_ made an incision in the process of spilling her guts. And he'd rejected it.

Sarah felt certain it had something to do with what she'd said, believing he was upset that she had broken his trust by lying for a full month. He'd claimed in the beginning that there was no trust to be had—that that was the point of their whole "this is just a story" exercise. But clearly her most recent rant had upset him deeply. She'd finally given details, given explanations. Instead of brief commentary and a few one-liners ("the only time I'd seen a fairy before that, it had bitten me,") this time she'd been specific. She was actually anxious to continue her discussion of Jareth with Dr. King, but that hadn't happened. Their session had only lasted a brief twenty minutes, tops. He usually kept her much longer, even when she said she was tired of talking about the Labyrinth. He'd ask her about school or her mother, her step-mother or Toby (anything but the crash, really.) This time, he'd just asked her to leave. She was disappointed and that bothered her. She wasn't supposed to be disappointed that he'd cancelled; she was supposed to be elated at the reprieve. But, somehow, she couldn't quite force herself to feel that way…

_iv_

"You're doing it."

"I'm pretty sure you don't have that authority."

"No, I don't, but I'm making you anyway."

"I thought your whole argument about the unhealthiness of my character's relationship with the Glitterazi King was that he was older and overstepping his bounds, using his authority to make her do things she didn't want to do. Sound familiar?"

Mr. Gomez shrugged theatrically. "What can I say? I'm a hypocrite." Sarah scowled.

She leaned against one of his desks in his empty classroom and he was directly across from her, sitting on his own desk. His legs were so long that his toes still met the floor.

"I don't want to do it, Mr. Gomez."

He chuckled, his mouth in a strangely endearing half-smirk. He had that kind of asymmetrical mouth that no one really envied but somehow looked handsome only on his face.

"Sarah, of all your stories, this one has the most potential. That a seventeen-year-old wrote it is a feat. It has layers of subtext. And yes, I will be the first to admit I dislike the premise, but that's half the reason I can't get the story out of my head. You make so many points but the reader can never get past the opening paragraph. You make the reader concerned yet confused. He's twice her age and manipulating her, yet she's convinced—and nearly convinces the reader—that she's in charge, in control. You question what it means to be youthful, what it means to be in control, whether age is relevant, whether hate and love can be one and the same, whether a teenager _can_ love or whether, as sick as it sounds, a man twice her age could potentially _love her innocently_."

Sarah snorted. " _Innocently?_ There's nothing _innocent_ about him."

Mr. Gomez lifted himself off the side of his desk. "Not innocent as in heroic. He's clearly dark, evil even. But he _believes_ that he has sacrificed for her. And maybe he has." He shrugged again.

She shook her head. "What? You, defending him? That's so…what do you even mean? What could he have _possibly_ sacrificed for her?" The suggestion disgusted her more than she would have admitted.

"What was most important to him?"

In the dim light streaming through the windows to her right, Sarah's hair seemed to shimmer like black satin. She tossed it over her shoulder and laughed outright.

"I don't know—probably his wardrobe."

Mr. Gomez snapped his fingers and pointed at her. She raised an eyebrow. "Exactly! Sarah, you've created a character whose most important possession in all his life was his _pride_. And he gave that up, for _her._ "

Sarah was silent. She watched dust particles float in the air between them. It sunk in. And she hated it.

"Why does that make you want to get it published?"

Mr. Gomez heaved a sigh. "Because I want to see you succeed."

Sarah titled her head at him and narrowed her eyes. He rolled his fingers on his desk, shook his head to himself. Again, he met her gaze. "Okay. Scout's honor, full truth. You want to hear it?" She nodded. "I want to see something _good_ come out of whatever it is that made you write these things. I want all this pain and cruelty at the hands of your peers culminate in something good. I want all the—all the rotten things you've experienced to become the fertilizer for your creativity. I want to see that. Is that so wrong?"

Sarah sat still. "No," she smiled. "That's not wrong at all."

"Good!" he clapped his hands together, seeming uncomfortable with the situation, and shuffled behind his desk. Going through his drawer, he pulled out a manila file and threw it onto the desk's surface. It fell heavily, thudding like a drum. Sarah considered it blankly.

"What's that?"

He furrowed his eyebrows. "That's…everything you've given me to read. The final edits you gave me to keep."

She kept staring. "I've written…all _that_?"

He laughed, grinning. "Oh yeah. I'm guessing you didn't keep them as organized as I did. You must have two books' worth of stuff here."

"And…what do you want me to do with it _now?_ " Her eyes were still glued to the thick folder.

"Well, I was thinking you should go back through a few of the better pieces and get a feel for all the different angles of your protagonist and her…whatever exactly it is he represents to her."

"Why?"

"So you can write a definitive, all-encompassing final edit of your most recent story." She finally looked up at him.

"You want me to go through _every thought I've ever had_ about this character so I can rewrite a four-page story about him?"

Mr. Gomez pretended to think, putting his finger to his chin, his arm crossed under his elbow. "Hm…um, _yes_."

She blanched.

He tiredly cocked his head. "Sarah, I believe you have the talent. Now show me you have the work ethic."

Her eyes slid back down to the folder.

It was one thing to handle her memories of Jareth in small doses, in bursts of inspiration and remembrance. But all at once? A Jareth-marathon of several weeks in the name of art?

_Can I even handle that?_

Mr. Gomez stood there, waiting.

Sarah took the folder.


	7. Babau

_i_

Sarah stared down the pages strewn across her bedroom floor. There were so many stories there—fiction rooted in fantastical fact.

Writing them was always easier than editing them. That was generally true of most writing to begin with, but it held especially true for Sarah Williams and her Glitterazi King Chronicles. _God, I need to come up with a better title than that._ Writing them was cathartic, salutatory. Reading them or editing them was like knives in her throat. It brought tears, sobs, and lowkey panic.

And Mr. Gomez wanted her to re-read _all of them_.

Carefully, Sarah reorganized the papers and set them each back into the folder. All but six.

Those six pages were the first story she'd written about Jareth that truly resembled him—in spirit as well as in fashion. It was the story in which she confronted him…about _everything_.

Dressed in her nightgown, she set the folder on her vanity and crawled into bed with the story.

Sarah's green eyes fell to the page on her lap, handwritten lines of painstakingly considered words and phrases. Everything she'd thought, everything she'd hated, all laid out in graphite. Her eyes scanned to the middle of the first page, just before the Fight that had so disturbed Mr. Gomez those many months ago:

I don't know why it mattered to me, but it did. It mattered because he'd forced himself into my life. And now all I wanted was a simple, clear answer to a simple, clear question.

"Why did you pick **_me_** _?_ " I asked. His face was impassive, unresponsive. Asking simple clear questions rarely yielded simple, clear answers with him. Part of his whole life philosophy was that life wasn't fair. Apparently, that philosophy extended to conversations, because no matter the subject, he refused to let me gain any ground…

_ii_

The dream had started out just as vaguely as the others: there was a ballroom, Jareth in a mask, music. She was in a beautiful evening dress. She tried to walk toward him, but she was swallowed by the crowd. She had felt an urgent need to get to him, to speak with him. But suddenly, she felt a sting in her shoulder. She saw her mouth open to cry out, but she heard no sound but the beautiful song. Turning to see what had caused it, she came face-to-face with the faerie she'd killed. Blue liquid spilled from its lips. Sarah staggered backwards as the creature seemed to crumple into itself mid-flight. She heard it's bones crack, saw the blue leaking out of every angle. Her hand reached back to touch her shoulder and found the hilt of a sword. Wincing, she dragged it out of her shoulder blade. The blade clattered onto the ballroom floor. The dancers still danced. They laughed. Seemingly drunk, they passed by her as if she were transparent, oblivious to her wound.

Nothing about this dream yet was out of the ordinary. The faerie had been a new addition that arrived immediately following its demise, but that was to be expected; it belonged in the Labyrinth, why shouldn't it belong in her dreams?

She stumbled backwards, her hands reaching out in an attempt to gain someone's attention, anyone who was willing to help. She left blue smears across their outlandish formalwear, but still they swayed and waltzed.

She again felt that same dizzying affect she'd felt when the faerie had sliced her arm. She swayed and the crowd finally took note; one masquerader came up to her, grabbed her by the waist and dragged her back and forth in a parody of a dance. She struggled, smelling _death_ on his lips and crashed her palms against his face. The mask fell back to reveal a decomposed, inhuman face. Maggots dropped down from his empty eye socket onto her dress. She screamed, screamed, screamed, but she could only hear the tinkling piano.

The dead thing let go and she stumbled, turned, ran through the crowd tripping.

Every face was watching her, now. They made a path for her and she kept running. She felt something behind her, something following. The ballroom was getting darker, blacker. There was only a dim light on the faces of these creatures, their masks appearing real and demonic, animalistic faces peering out at her down an endless corridor of night. Claustrophobic. Dizzy. Who could help her? Surely the room wasn't this long? Was she going in circles?

Sarah gulped in the air around her, feeling her chest tighten. She wanted to talk to him. She had something to say to him. God, where was he?

 ** _JARETH_** **,** her voice called out, incorporeal. Her lips were suddenly sewn shut. Her hands went up to feel the stitches, blood leaking down her chin.

She spun around and around, suddenly surrounded by these creatures. Their masks were not masks, they were faces. Inhuman creatures, leering and smelling and deathly.

Through the crowd, she caught a quick glimpse of _red_ , some kind of red. And as she shot forward, breaking through the death and the groping hands:

"Jareth!" she shouted, her lips sealed but her voice suddenly clear. The head of red hair looked up, staring deep into her eyes.

She skidded to a stop abruptly, face mere inches from his. Her lips were no longer sealed. Her breath swelled and the bright red strands of hair in his face trembled like a curtain in the wind. "You're not who I'm looking for," she whispered. He didn't seem to hear her.

"Sarah, start from the beginning."

_iii_

_He called me Sarah_.

Sweat flew off her brow, dribbled down her forehead as she heaved for breath in the darkness. She'd gone to sleep late that night after re-reading the story twice and setting it back into the folder.

Sarah wasn't unused to waking up in the night, having had night terrors. Images and memories haunted her, terrorized her, had her by the throat. In the daylight she was often fine. The nighttime was another story entirely.

This, however, wasn't like other night terrors.

This was the first time the dream had included something—or, rather, some _one_ —other than the Labyrinth.

_He called me Sarah._

Sarah blinked into the darkness, her breath slowly regulating. Her hands were still shaking. She felt too warm, the comforter suddenly too heavy. She tried tossing it off her, but it wouldn't give. Desperate to get to the light next to her bed, she frantically struggled with the comforter, wrapped around her legs. Her breath was loud, suffocatingly loud, in the room. She was so desperate for light, she felt like crying. A sob wrenched out of her throat as she finally worked her legs free and dragged herself to the bed stand, her hands groping wildly for the light switch on the lamp.

Light bathed the room and she reflexively threw her arm across her eyes. The motion threw her off balance. She thudded to the floor, feeling her hip bruise through her night gown.

She stayed on the floor, eyes staring up at the vaulted ceiling, one leg still propped up on the bed, the other bent at an uncomfortable angle.

 _He called me Sarah_.

_Dr. King called me Sarah and I didn't correct him. And now he's in my nightmares._

She hadn't even caught it when it happened; if she hadn't dreamt of it just then, she likely wouldn't ever have caught it or remembered that he'd slipped. Or perhaps he _hadn't_ slipped; perhaps he had called her that in the hopes that she wouldn't correct him, thereby strengthening some kind of trust in their relationship.

Sarah didn't know. All she knew was that she was terribly disturbed at the idea that she hadn't even noticed. She was disturbed that Dr. King made her feel equal parts uncertain and far too comfortable.

She was disturbed that he was now in her dreams.

She shut her eyes against the onslaught of light above her. Her nerves were slowly recoverin

Afdsgfhjue5ytrhgfbvdsewteyhgfbfd

the light out her leg bleeding its face contorted its teeth its claws scratching under her bed she kicks she grasps at the bedframe the nightstand the floor anything it won't drag her under she won't be dragged under oh god oh god oh god its dragging her in it'll take her away

_I won't go back I won't go back I won't—_

_iv_

Karen was awoken to an ear-splitting screech.

It wasn't uncommon, it wasn't unusual. Sarah thought she'd learned to control her nightmares, but the screams had only slightly mitigated through the years. Karen had only left her alone because she knew Sarah hated anyone knowing.

She lay in bed, holding her breath, waiting for the screams to stop when Sarah inevitably would wake up.

The screams kept coming; Karen knew this was a bad one. Turning over in her bed, she pulled the pillow over her ear and began to cry.

_v_

Glossy crimson eyes gleamed out at her from under the bed, clutching at her legs, her hip, her waist. Long arms with sharp claws. She couldn't see much in the dim moonlight through the window, but she knew. She knew what this was.

This was a goblin. An overgrown, monstrous nightmare, attempting to drag her under her own bed into wherever it was it had crawled out of to get to her. _They're not supposed to be this big,_ she frightfully thought, confused on more than one level.

It wasn't leaving terrible cuts yet; it clearly wanted to get her fully under the bed before it did whatever it intended on doing.

Sarah glanced towards her bedroom door in the darkness. Everything was happening so fast, yet at the same time it felt as if it were happening in slow motion. How long had she been screaming?

 _Where is Karen?_ she thought frantically. The panic was coursing through her veins, adrenaline and chaos in her body as she fought for her life. Why was this thing not killing her immediately?

 _She thinks it's just a nightmare_ , she realized.

All at once, Sarah stopped screaming. Karen wasn't coming. And really, she thought, did she _want_ her to?

The moment her mouth shut, the creature stopped. Its nose flared. Its eyes rolled to look towards the bedroom door, then back to Sarah's face.

Perplexed, Sarah stared. What the hell was it doing? But there was a maliciousness in the way it looked at her when its eyes returned to hers—a new kind of ambition there, swimming in its head. It reached out with new purpose, new livid intent. It dawned on her. _It wants me to scream_. _It wants Karen to come._ _ **It wants to kill Karen, too.**_

Unexpectedly, Sarah was filled with an assurance of mind unlike anything she'd ever felt. This wasn't a kidnapping attempt on her babe brother; this wasn't just an unknown. This was an assassination attempt on her family. And she'd be damned if she let it win.

Her foot reared up and struck it in the eye. It growled, but the sound was muffled, as if it were having difficulty. It wasn't strong; it was large, but it could barely groan without sounding tired. _Not used to your victims fighting back, are you? What did you take me for, a toddler?_ In spite of herself, Sarah grinned vengefully. In the corner of her eye, she could see the lamp on the floor. Her hand reached out to grope for it as she gave it another kick to the face, her foot feeling sticky. _I'm going to kick your ass._

It opened its mouth in silent rage at her struggle, dirty teeth and sticky saliva reflecting in the dim light. It finally raked a claw from her hip to her knee, ripping her nightgown. Sarah groaned, her eyes rolling into the back of her skull, her body arching on the floor in agony. But she bit her lip. She couldn't scream. Wouldn't scream. Karen couldn't come. Sarah had learned her lesson last time.

_You can do this. You can do this._

She sat up and pulled away, its claws digging into the muscle of her thigh. She locked her jaw, clenched her teeth, and gripped the lamp.

"Come and get me, bogeyman," she whispered. Its strange red eyes widened and all at once it began to clamber out from under her bed. It crawled forward, quickly, nearly on top of her.

She threw her arm in a wide arch, the lamp swinging above her head.

The lamp dully pounded against its deformed head, the creature rolling sideways off of her. But she wasn't done yet.

Possessed by a need to protect the few good things in her life, a fire drilled through her stomach, she followed the creature onto her floor. She straddled it, the lamp above her head. Its claws were too close to slicing her from the sides, but she was faster. She brought the heavy lamp down with as much strength as she'd ever had.

A large crack made its way up the side of the lamp as the ceramic met the floor.

The floor.

There was nothing else there.

Suddenly, she was alone in the room.

It had disappeared and she was left alone, shaking and alert in a bloodied nightgown on her bedroom floor.


	8. Spilt Milk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sarah begins to go over the edge, Karen has difficulty coping, and Dr. King swears to protect our heroine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone asked me a question a while back concerning Dr. King's role as a psychiatrist, stating that psychiatrists don't typically employ psychoanalysis. And while that is true today, it was not true in the 1970s (nor, in my opinion, should it be true today. I mean, if someone is going to give you a prescription for a mental illness, you'd hope they would spend a little more time with you than just a quick diagnosis. Look it up; it's a real problem and the New York Times has a great article about the changing world of psychiatric practices.) At any rate, I thought I'd include that information for anyone who had a similar query. Enjoy!

_i_

Sarah's eyes were bloodshot.

Karen pretended not to notice.

It had been three nights since The Event.

Sarah counted every hour. Every. Single. Waking. Hour. Because, not the least bit to her own surprise, she found herself unable to close her eyes. In fact, she found herself unable to so much as turn her lights off.

Unlike Sarah, Toby slept soundly upstairs, as young children are wont to do on weekends. Sarah envied him to nearly the same degree she feared for him.

Karen busied herself around the kitchen.

Sarah felt the world closing in on her.

It had all been so promising just a few weeks before. She might have had no friends; she might have been only a peppy shadow of her former, pre-crash, pre-Labyrinth self. But at least she could say she was content. She was free of the Hell of her own nightmares being smeared in the hardened, sarcastic tonalities of every professional in the county.

But now.

Now, more than ever, she felt _truly alone_. Now, more than ever before, she felt truly trapped.

"Milk?"

Sarah's eyes lazily rolled upward to meet her stepmother's anxious, frightened gaze. In her hand she held a carton of milk, but that hand was shaking nearly imperceptibly. Sarah tried to think of something she could do— _anything_ —to alleviate Karen's concern. But the only thing she could think of—in fact, the only thing she could seem to think of _at all_ lately—was sleep. Sleep was the answer. And sleep was the only damn thing she couldn't allow herself. No, not even in daylight. Not in darkness. Not ever.

"Yes, please," Sarah tried to push the glass closer to the edge of the table where Karen stood. Her tired fingers stretched just an inch too far and it tumbled downward, shattering across the floor.

Karen stood there in her heels, her hair perfectly sprayed and her nails red as blood. "Human blood, at least," Sarah murmured, her eyes glazed over.

Milk erupted from the open top of the milk carton and sloshed onto the surface of the tablecloth. Sarah heard Karen struggling to muffle the sobs with the palms of her hands as she fled the room, leaving Sarah to stare at the milk soaking down, down, down. _It'll damage the wood_ , she thought. She stood and folded an edge of the cloth over, arranging the breakfast plates onto the bare corner. She rolled the cloth carefully, slowly, fatigued. Her hands seemed oversized compared to the size of the plates. _But they're so heavy_ , she thought. Had plates always been this heavy?

With the floral yellow cloth in her arms, she turned towards the pantry.

She felt the glass cut into the soles of her feet.

The brightly patterned bundle fell from her arms in a heap onto the glass shards. Sarah collapsed back into her chair, head in her hands.

Her stomach heaved but she swallowed it back down.

She saw wet marks arrive on her pajama bottoms. She gasped for air, gasped against the panic, gasped against the vise in her throat and her chest. Her hands seized, her shoulders tightened.

Under those pajamas, she sported the ugliest marks she'd ever seen on youthful skin.

On _any_ skin.

Sarah knew the blood seeping out from under her foot onto the linoleum was not the most blood this house had seen. Her bedroom carpet had been scrubbed with chemical until the flesh of her hands was raw. She had poured an entire hydrogen peroxide bottle over her legs with a sock in her mouth and tears streaming down the sides of her face through the screwed-shut pleats of her eyelids. Her bath tub floor had been smeared with browning red and subsequently bleached until it was the whitest she had ever seen it.

Some of her actions hadn't even been for the sake of ridding her room of evidence, of any potential for the state to suggest she had crossed over into psychologically dangerous territory. Some of it had felt very necessary. Scrubbing her carpet until the sun broke over the roofs of the neighborhood, squeezing the blood from her every wound even when she knew damn well her wounds had none left to give…these things hadn't been necessary. Necessary, no. Important? To her, yes, it had been.

She'd stuffed the bloody, torn clothes into a black plastic bag and thrown them into the trash can. The sky was dark, the air was cold, and the light on the horizon was pale blue. Her staccato breath had left clouds in the air.

Karen hadn't come to see what she was doing; even if she had been awake, Sarah always used to get up to do chores following a heinous nightmare. Karen never bothered her, knowing it was a coping method. So the shower running, the crinkle of plastic, the opening and shutting of doors were all routine—or, at least _had been_ , before Sarah had started to "get better."

She'd not had such a terrible "nightmare" in months. Karen had thought she was improving. But now…

Karen sat on her bed, weeping.

God only knew she hated it, but the thought had been bouncing around her head for ages. When Sarah seemed to be getting better, she'd been so relieved. Relieved that she was spared of having to pursue that last resort.

But now…

Karen cried harder.

_ii_

"Miss Williams?"

"Don't call me that."

Dr. King jolted. His surprise should have given her joy. It didn't. She was too numb for that now. She didn't even look him in the eye now—not because he made her uncomfortable, but because she couldn't handle that kind of human contact today.

"Call you _what?_ You were the one who requested I call you—"

"Sarah. My name is Sarah and you used that name without permission."

His head tilted. Something in them were concerned, were scared. Not of her, it seemed, but _for_ her. They didn't bore into her as before. They softened. Sarah went back to staring over his shoulder.

"And?"

"And don't use my personal name if you're going to break my trust immediately after."

He raised his eyebrows, his hands spreading in an open gesture. "I honestly don't see how I—"

"Don't."

"Don't…?"

"Lie to me. That was _your_ requirement. No lies." Her eyes finally slid back to meet his. "So don't you _dare_ lie to me."

He paused, their eyes locked. "I slipped," he said, his voice low and tinged with…guilt? "I…will make certain not to make that mistake again."

"You cancelled the last session."

"Perhaps you were not the only one who felt betrayed or… _lied_ to."

Sarah sighed and nodded. "Yeah, fair enough."

She fell quiet. Dr. King's eyes appraised her, quickly losing any semblance of contrition.

" _Miss Williams_ , how much sleep have you been getting?" Her first name, just that one time, had slid off his tongue easily, as if he'd said it a thousand times. And now, hearing the comparison, she realized he sounded as if calling her 'Miss Williams' were some kind of personal struggle. Sarah blinked. She wondered if this was one of those tricks her mind played on her when she dealt with insomnia. Lord knows she used to hallucinate. She couldn't pick out the truth from the visions.

Dr. King's head inclined. " _Miss Williams?_ "

"Yes?" she acknowledged him tiredly. He balked. She either hadn't heard him or she'd forgotten he'd even asked the question. She wasn't present.

The tips of his fingers met as he leaned back into his seat, watching her from under his lids. "I believe," he began, "you once mentioned an aversion to chaise lounges."

Her eyes closed blearily and dragged back open. No sarcastic retort. No prompt, clever reply. This was not Sarah as she should be.

"That being said," he stood and walked around the coffee table to her side, "Perhaps we should move this session into the other room. I think you'd be more comfortable in a room that smells less like cigarettes." He paused, waiting for her inevitable rant on the habit she considered so deplorable and disgusting. Sarah stared outward, unspeaking. Dr. King swallowed and pressed again. "What do you think?"

Sarah didn't move. He wasn't even certain she was entirely aware he'd spoken. Hesitantly, his fingertips brushed her shoulder. She moved as if struck by lightning, standing abruptly and heaving for breath. She'd fallen asleep momentarily and his awakening touch…his touch had felt like—like— "Like some kind of fire," she whispered through the quickly-dying adrenaline. Dr. King furrowed his eyebrows. This fragment of a sentence came to him completely out of context. She _needed_ sleep.

"Come with me." His voice was hard, not to be reckoned with. It reminded her of something…of some _one_. But she moved, regardless. She saw her feet moving. The moments felt like stop-motion animation, as if frames were missing in the storyboard. She heard a door open, stepped through, and felt herself sink onto a long cushion.

The world was silent for a moment, her vision darkened.

"NO!" she bolted upward. The whites of her eyes shone through more clearly than the sun in the sky, bright and unyielding. Her hands gripped his right arm, hard. There was a startled look in his eye, something intense. He was hearing her. She could see it; he _heard her_. He wasn't like the others. She could tell him. She _had to_ tell him.

"I can't," she choked out. Were those tears on her face? Was her face wet? She shook the thought away, ridding herself of everything but her mission. "I can't sleep."

"Why not," he shot back, breathing through his nose like a steed in a race.

"It'll come. I have to be here when it comes. It'll kill them." Her grip fell limp and she collapsed back onto the ugly green chaise lounge in the center of Dr. Benton's office. Her body was a bag of bones. She began to sob. "God, it's going to kill my family…"

Her body was shaken sharply. She gasped and blinked. "No, it won't." His eyes were level with hers, inches from her face. His large hands were holding her shoulders firmly, as if her were physically holding her together. "But you can't fight _anything_ if you are the walking dead."

"How will—"

" _I'll_ keep guard. I'll—" he cut himself off, closed his eyes. She thought she saw his lips move, thought he said something to himself that sounded like chastisement. And then, taking a deep breath, he started again, quieter. "I'll watch over you, Sarah."

Her eyes searched his.

A weight suddenly lifted from her mind. She was safe. _I'm safe,_ she thought. _He's here_ , she assured herself.

And the world went black.

_iii_

Karen held the receiver to her face and swallowed heavily.

Long ringing tones replied into her ear. Her throat was as sticky as it was dry. This was not what she wanted to do. But she was at the end of her rope, dammit, and if this saved Sarah's life, then it was what needed to be done.

The line clicked.

 _"_ _Hello?"_ a voice spoke.

Karen took a deep breath and shut her eyes, readying herself.

 _"_ _Hello? Is anyone there?"_ The voice sounded confrontational, inherently annoyed. Its owner would hang up in an instant if she didn't say something.

"Yes! Yes, hello," Karen finally responded.

_"…_ _Who is this?"_

"Hi—well, hello. This—well, this is Karen. Karen….Williams."

Nothing came through the line but breathing. And then, laughter. Derisive, unpleasant laughter.

_"_ _What the hell are you calling_ _**me** _ _for?"_

Karen bit her lip until she tasted blood.

"I…I was wondering if you might be willing to come… _visit._ " The word tasted bitter on her tongue. Karen wanted to wash her mouth out.

_"_ _Let me get this straight._ _**You** _ _want_ _**me** _ _to come for a visit?"_

"Yes…?" Her answer sounded uncertain even to her own ears.

_"_ _Why."_

Karen glanced at her own reflection in her bedroom mirror above the telephone. Her hand gripped the receiver, her knuckles whitening. She hated this. _God_ , she _loathed_ this.

But she wasn't doing this for her. She was doing it for Sarah.

"To save your daughter."

_iv_

When Sarah awoke two hours later, it was to an unfamiliar ceiling painted puke green. Her mind began to readjust to the world, slowly, still fatigued but not nearly as terribly as before.

"Tell me something." Dr. King's voice was raw. Sarah continued to stare at the ceiling.

"Anything," she replied, still somewhat disoriented. She didn't realize how intimate that word sounded in response to his question. She did hear him drag in a long surge of breath.

"Tell me…what the Labyrinth was _really_ like."

"I've already described it for you."

She heard him sigh again from the other side of the room.

"No, you've told me details. Unusual details, granted. But you haven't told me what it _felt like_."

"Oh," Sarah laughed lightly. "Yeah, it felt like Hell."

There was a long pause from the other side of the room.

"Thank you." Something about that comment sounded absolutely nothing like gratitude. Sarah shook her head and dismissed it.

She rolled off the lounge and nearly hit the floor. Catching herself, she dragged her body into an upright position.

"How long was I here?"

"Two and a half hours."

"That's an hour longer than our session."

"I cut into your library time, I know. But frankly I think you needed this more than an A."

Sarah stood there in the center of the room, feeling somehow transparent, somehow stripped. He was taking notes in a file folder, his eyes cast downward into his lap. She'd gone to sleep feeling trust and, before that, feeling invincible in her forced apathy.

Now she just felt out of place—as if she weren't truly meant to be here, in this room, with him.

His eyes lifted upward and he gave her a sad smile.

"You should go home, Sarah."

Her lips moved, forming her own name, but not speaking it aloud.

Silence stretched.

"There is power in words, Dr. King," she finally heard herself say.

To her surprise, he began to laugh—no, not laugh. Cackle. Maniacally.

And, in a sentence broken by laughter and denoted by a heavy hint of madness, she heard him reply: "Yes! Yes, Sarah, I _know_."

Dazed, she escaped through the door. She could still hear him laughing when she turned down the hallway.

_v_

Karen stepped out the backdoor, hauling a large (and heavy) bag of kitchen trash in her manicured hands. She'd triple-bagged the glass shards left behind by that morning's incident.

A group of stray cats fled from the sound of the door, leaving the open trash can in a hurry. "Pests," she murmured. She lifted the bag to set into the can.

She froze.

Within, an animal—probably the cats—had apparently ripped open one of the bags.

The cats had dragged out Sarah's favorite pajamas.

They were torn.

And they were covered in blood.

The glass shards broke a second time as the bag dropped to the pavement.


End file.
